Instead of showing that non-human animals are unconscious, anthropic reasoning may show that such animals are conscious if we are not ourselves soon doomed to extinction. Expanding the class of observers to include such animals makes it less surprising that we find ourselves living at this comparatively early stage of human evolution, since “we” refers to conscious rather than to merely human beings.
This argument assumes that most non-human animals will soon go extinct. But this assumption makes sense under many of the possible scenarios involving human survival.
Instead of showing that non-human animals are unconscious, anthropic reasoning may show that such animals are conscious if we are not ourselves soon doomed to extinction. Expanding the class of observers to include such animals makes it less surprising that we find ourselves living at this comparatively early stage of human evolution, since “we” refers to conscious rather than to merely human beings.
This argument assumes that most non-human animals will soon go extinct. But this assumption makes sense under many of the possible scenarios involving human survival.